Why do governments need to be held accountable?

In 2012, leaders from around the world gathered at the London Summit on Family Planning to generate global commitments aimed at enabling 120 million more women and girls to use contraceptives by 2020 and establish a partnership, Family Planning (FP2020), to help achieve them. However, FP2020 commitments can only be achieved with coordinated action at the local level, across multiple sectors and partners. Local stakeholders, including civil society, must be able to monitor progress towards achieving FP2020 goals to ensure government accountability.

How can local stakeholders ensure accountability?

In Uganda, an innovative approach to galvanizing civil society support for and involvement in achieving FP2020 goals has taken hold. The approach, known as the Motion Tracker, is a customized, dynamic framework for strengthening accountability and driving action. A six-step process led by local civil society organizations (CSOs), the Motion Tracker does this by

• Keeping commitments visible and highlighting progress.
• Ensuring universal understanding of commitments through purposeful and concurrent stakeholder engagement.
• Harmonizing efforts and harnessing CSO’s collective power.
• Fostering partner participation, engagement, and ownership to address bottlenecks.

The tracker includes an online, user-friendly tool for visualizing action and progress towards commitments.